Madden NFL 2004

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The third GBA incarnation of the EA football series is only a minor update, but it's still pretty decent.

By Craig Harris

It's clear that, after getting pretty much the exact same football game three years in a row, the Game Boy Advance isn't exactly a priority for Electronic Arts to focus its Madden energies. Madden NFL 2004 does offer a laundry list of improvements over last year's game, but it's a small list, and it's difficult to recommend the game if you've already picked up one or both of the past two games on the GBA. But, for all intents and purposes EA offers up the best football game on the system; and regardless if the game is the only football franchise on the handheld, at least it's a quality product and a worthwhile one-time handheld investment.

Features

All NFL teams and players

Create-a-player mode

Regular season, playoffs, and exhibition

Statistics tracking

Cartridge save

Link cable support for two players.

Connectivity with GameCube

Only for Game Boy Advance

The Madden NFL series started on the Game Boy Advance two years ago in Madden NFL 2002, where GBA developer Budcat Creations worked with Tiburon to essentially port over the latest and most successful version created for the Super NES; makes sense, since the GBA and SNES share similar capabilities in their hardware. For Madden NFL 2003, a handful of tweaks were made to the gameplay, including new rosters for the current NFL season as well as a Create a Player mode that featured a handful of mini-challenges. Madden NFL 2004 is as much a step up from Madden 2003 as 2003 was from 2002; in other words, very little. But it's enough to make it slightly better than last year as last year's was to the year before, but not enough to plunk down an additional 30 bucks if you've done so in 2002. Or 2001.

The slightly angled top-down game engine is still in place for the 2004 edition, but the developers added a camera function that drops down the angle down even tighter behind the player with the ball after the snap. It's an extremely minor addition to the viewing screen, and it's hard to say if it was put in more as a functional thing than an "ooh neat," effect. But it's clear that the engine doesn't exactly handle this additional camera transition seamlessly; the animation hiccups noticeably after the snap when the camera drops, but it's still entirely playable even with the drop in framerate. Is the trade-off necessary? I don't think so...but I think it's in there so that the developers can show EA and consumers that they weren't just sitting on their hands for a year.

Gameplay is relatively unchanged from the 2002 season, featuring the same icon system for passing plays, as well as the standard stiff arm/spin move/dive player control to get a few extra yards. It admittedly has been tweaked a bit to allow for more lenient collisions between players, loosening up the "brick wall" feel of the blockers to let more runners through. The game design doesn't come anywhere close to the realism that the console versions have evolved into, but that's the breaks when it comes to the sprite-based engine...it just can't offer the same versatile gameplay. But even without the realism, Madden NFL 2004 is still a solid playing game of football.

The create-a-player and player trades feature from last year are back again, and are definitely welcome for those looking to move players across the NFL when the actual trades happen during the season. The cartridge save holds a lot of data, especially when it comes to saving statistics. The create-a-player is still dependent on how well the performance is during the mini-camps, and these mini-games are a nice little change from the standard football gameplay...regardless if they're completely unchanged from last year's game.

The biggest addition to the gameplay is the "connectivity" feature that links the cartridge to the GameCube version of Madden NFL 2003. But, like the feature in Metroid Fusion, it's the GameCube owners that benefit from this link; all that's required is the cartridge in the system to unlock a few exclusive extras on the console. No extras for the GBA players...the cart is a dongle and nothing more than that.

But even if the developers are still following the design docs from the previous games, there is absolutely no reason why the play select screen has to be controlled the same way a third time on the GBA. The design is meant to hide the players' choice of play from the opposition; but considering that if you're against a second opponent he's got his own view of the game, there's no reason why the developers couldn't just let players choose the play with a much more specific cursor system. Let me highlight the specific play instead of choosing one of three through a clunky button system that's just not necessary on the GBA format.

The Verdict

Madden's always going to be a classic, but it'd be nice to see the game evolve on the Game Boy Advance as much as it has on the console. Maybe the developers should start stealing assets from the more realistic looking 3DO system design. Something needs to be done. Yes, the game is still fun. Yes, the game will please fans of the classic old-school Madden. But keeping the game nearly identical every year isn't going to get you any new fans. Let's freshen it up for next year, hmm?